Student at Rice and Baylor College of Medicine elected to American Medical Association Board

Meredith Williams, a student in the MD/MBA program at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, has been elected to the American Medical Association (AMA) Board of Trustees.

She is the only medical student on the 21-member board, which makes decisions for the AMA's quarter-of-a-million physician and medical student members. The association's mission is to help patients by uniting physicians nationwide to work on the most important professional and public health issues as they shape the future of medicine.

Williams was elected by representatives of the nearly 50,000 members of the AMA-Medical Student Section, which she will represent on the board. The AMA-MSS is the nation's most influential organization of medical students, and Williams said she intends to serve as a "connector" to make the AMA aware of what is important to the students and to advise the students about the AMA's priorities.

"The Medical Student Section is dedicated to improving medical education and promoting activism for the health of America," Williams said. "Students benefit from having a representative on the board who can help explain the many moving parts of a large complex organization like the AMA. Likewise, the AMA trustees benefit from knowing what the students are trying to do."

Williams said her experience as a trustee for the Texas Medical Association (TMA) last year helped give her the confidence to run for a position on the national board. As a member of the TMA board, she spearheaded a campaign that raised $70,000 for medical students at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston who suffered losses from Hurricane Ike.

She hopes more medical students will realize the importance of getting involved with professional societies like the AMA. "You can learn a lot about medicine outside the classroom and clinical experience by talking to people in organized medicine," she said. "And this is one of the most exciting times to be a part of the AMA because the association is so heavily involved with discussions on what's going on with health care reform."

Starting in April 2010, Williams will serve as an invited observer on the AMA board. Her one-year position as a trustee with voting privileges will begin in June.

A native of Oakland, Calif., Williams has a B.A. from Yale University, where she graduated magna cum laude with honors in history. She entered Baylor in fall 2006 and completed the first two years of medical school. She then entered the MBA program at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business, where she will complete her coursework this semester. Williams will continue her medical education at Baylor in January as a third-year student. She is scheduled to graduate with an MD/MBA in 2011. She hopes to do a residency in emergency medicine and then enter a clinical practice that will also enable her to apply her business school training, possibly in hospital administration, health insurance, patient safety or health care reform.